Any mention of the original version of Pussy Cats carries with it a mystique thick with references to '70s pop culture. Harry Nilsson recorded the album of covers during one of the infamous "lost weekends" of John Lennon. While Yoko and John were apart, Lennon and Nilsson went on an archetypal binge, submersing themselves in an emotive void of drugs and alcohol.

Needless to say, the record came out a little rough around the edges. Nilsson blew a hole in his vocal cords, but not wanting to end a recording session produced by Lennon, managed to sing in a gravelly falsetto.

As their singer Hamilton Leithauser is an expert in gravelly vocals, the Walkmen decided to cover the entire album.

Pussy Cats Starring the Walkmen is the band's fourth studio record, and it comes on the heels of a series of successes, weighing it down with the often painful responsibility of indie credibility. When I saw the Walkmen touring for their last record Louisiana, a sparse audience of fans greeted a band deserving of a rowdy crowd.

The first time a bunch of talented musicians recorded Pussy Cats, the music became a sickly tribute to lust and love, charming in Lennon and Nilsson's drunken combination. With the Walkmen weighing in, the record seems to be about the music itself. In particular, it pays homage to Harry Nilsson, the little-known giant of '70s pop, whose career spanned an incredible chronology of pop culture, beginning with Little Richard and including stints with both Randy Newman and Whoopi Goldberg.

For the Walkmen, Pussy Cats Starring the Walkmen comes off as pop rock's last hurrah, an elegy for good times in A minor. The listener feels the Walkmen's love for the album, but at the same time there is a note of concern for the decay of pop rock. For evidence of this sentiment we need go no further than the last track "Rock Around the Clock," in which we hear a drill in the background, demolishing the now mythical recording space where the Walkmen honed their craft.

Indeed, with serious music fans demanding Bob Dylan from every Brooklyn band emerging from the woodwork, perhaps garage rock should just give up, submit to the evolutions of disco and Thom Yorke's dissonant atonal prophesies.

Personally, I want to believe that rock can live for a few more years on the rapidly diminishing echoes of the Beatles and the Sex Pistols.

Numerous critics have complained that this reproduction of Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats is musically stagnant, that the Walkman should have made creative innovations. On the contrary, what I find so creepy and fantastic about the record is its exacting replication. By achieving a sound that matches Nilsson, the Walkman have validated a brilliant, musically important album that shines among better-known albums, even among better known musicians, of a rapidly fading classical era of American pop music.

Throw on Pussy Cats "Save the Last Dance" when one of those lonely Saturday nights finally ends in intoxicated happiness with that special someone.

Reach Intermission reporter Erik Stinson at arts@thedaily.washington.edu.